Neutrality is a welcome trait, especially in the eyes of the aggressor. Means evading help to the victim. In September 2001, Bush Jr. demanded that the outside world decide whether “you are with us – or with the terrorists.” It was an easy and simple choice. Even Iran then supported the United States, albeit for a brief moment.
● Germany wants to return to being a military power and arming itself with Israeli weapons
The two aggressive powers of World War II, Germany and Japan, debated defining their place in the world after their independence was renewed. They did not choose neutrality, because dangers lurked on all sides. They made military alliances with the United States and huddled under its umbrella of defense. But they imposed extreme restrictions on themselves. Japan even banned itself from setting up an army. Germany, that is, West Germany of those days, eventually established an army, though it forbade itself to send it overseas, and forbade itself to sell arms to countries outside the NATO alliance.
This has changed over time. A German army fought alongside the United States in Afghanistan, and German weapons reached foreign markets, including Israel. But the self-doubt did not pass. It could be found mostly on the left.
Ukraine has changed the direction of wind in Europe. Even countries with a pacifist leaning were amazed at the blatant nature of Russian aggression. We have seen Scandinavia and the Low Countries reconsider their place in the world. Neutrality has ceased to serve the defense needs of Sweden and Finland; The avoidance of active participation in military alliances ceased to serve the needs of Denmark. This is Denmark, where one of its major parties proposed 50 years ago to reduce the defense budget to a speaker on the border, from which a message will emerge in Russian – “We are giving up.”
Putin’s war settled overnight the perpetual misunderstanding with the United States over the share of defense spending in the national budget. This misunderstanding led Donald Trump to outbursts of overt hostility towards European allies. He even said of the very notion that NATO’s existence was “outdated.”
Putin’s “historic mistake” in Ukraine, as the French president calls it, put European pacifism in a deep freeze, but did not bury it. Germany’s Social Democrat chancellor goes out of his way not to go out of his way. Ukraine depends on its existence not only in the willingness to fill its weapons depots but in the speed of delivery of weapons and ammunition. The German press is full of reports of the Chancellor’s deliberate slowness, including a report earlier this week that he thwarted Spain’s attempt to transfer German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
What does Germany want is a complicated question. There has always been a complicated question. She herself suspects herself. A famous German journalist warned 70 years ago against the establishment of an army. “Where there is a German army, there is a war,” he said.
Germany’s massive armament is warranted by the situation in Europe, but it stems from the possibility that the five-armed Germany will no longer need an American umbrella. After Trump entered the White House in 2017, the editor of the important German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called on his country to develop nuclear weapons, because the United States was becoming a broken barrel.
A self-governing Germany is, at least potentially, a self-assured Germany, an exempt and restraining Germany. Such an option must provoke at least a slight degree of discomfort.